1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate generally to a system for enabling users to endorse products through Internet advertisements, and for advertisers to control who endorses their products.
2. Description of Related Art
As is known in the art, Internet advertisements may consist of text-based ads, pop-ups, images, etc. Various methods currently exist for relating particular advertisements to particular content; for example, an advertising system may parse a web page's source code to determine what the page is generally about, and then present advertisements against the deduced topics/subjects.
In the non-Internet world, the “product endorsement” is common. As is generally known, a product endorsement may be thought of as a recommendation by some person for a particular product (e.g., celebrity John Doe recommends a certain brand of chewing gum, etc.). Endorsements can be very effective and can help both the endorser gain wider public appeal and the advertiser sell more product. Despite the online advertising boom, there currently exists no end-to-end, real-world-to-online translation of the endorsement-marketing concept.
Moreover, the brick-and-mortar world generally requires endorsers to be well-known celebrities, who can usually be afforded only by large, well-to-do companies. Much like the Internet's general democratization of advertisements, so too can it make endorsements accessible to a larger population. For example, instead of a popular sports star endorsing a cereal, you may have a reality TV personality endorsing a brand of clothing associated with the show on which she appears. As another example, consider a master gardener in the San Franscisco area—a “micro”-celebrity—endorsing plant shops local to him; by allowing “micro”-celebrities to endorse products, the “long tail” of products can be brought together with the “long tail” of endorsers.
Thus, it would be desirable to enable persons to be paid for endorsing products on the Internet, and to make the entire process easy for both advertisers and endorsers.